As Siobhan Garrigan, who studies English at the University of Lincoln,
puts it: "Young people don't want to identify as feminists because there
is this man-hating, frumpy, lesbian image forced on us."

You must have heard about those accusations many, many times before! I certainly have. I'm gorgeous, lurve men (especially with pesto and garlic) and, sadly, fail to be anything but quite heterosexual. Well OK. I'm not gorgeous. But I certainly am not frumpy! The gall, she mutters.

All joking aside, those three accusations don't have anything to do with each other. The first one states that anyone wanting gender equality must hate men. That's pretty weird. The second one argues, that women who want gender equality cannot be attractive enough to get men in a system where women are second-class citizens. Only unattractive women would want equality!

That's illogical, too. Finally, one's sexuality has nothing to do with one's desire for a gender-equal society. All illogical, says Echidne.

But squint your eyes a bit, and you see the underlying pattern, what all three of these things share: These women do not try to please men. Or that's the suspicion of anyone using those accusations. Wanting equality means not wanting to please men. Therefore, women who want equality must hate men, be unattractive or prefer women in their sexuality.

Now, I don't accept those accusations. I'm also willing to admit that there have been feminists who hate men (but nowhere near the numbers of MRA guys who hate women), that all social justice movements have more or less frumpy people of both sexes in them and so on. But no other social justice movement is taken to task for anything similar. No other social justice movement needs to say "but of course we love you, other guys!" or try to make sure that their members are nicely made-up and properly behaved. It's only demanded of feminism, and that, I suspect, is because of women's traditional roles and traditional gender stereotypes.

Besides, the sexes are not independent of each other, and statements which ostracize feminism have a powerful impact because of that. Nobody wants to be shunned by the groups of their peers, after all.

Second Class of Arguments

This crops up quite a bit in the comments. In the more sophisticated form it's a criticism of feminism as a political movement without intersectionality. In the rougher forms the argument is about rich women perhaps being slightly worse off than rich men but who cares? As one commentator states, how do poor women get helped if some women become judges or famous television personalities? Her life remains the same.

From the latter angle feminism is unimportant because it is seen as a movement which only focuses on wealthy, educated, white women who are better off than, say, poor, uneducated, black men. Or poor women of any race.

Here I want to draw a distinction between feminism as-a-political-movement and feminism-as-a-theory. The two are different, I've come to believe, and while intersectionality is important in both fields, the idea that focusing on gender in isolation isn't useful for anyone but the top women in the society is misplaced when it comes to theory.

It helps to understand how gender plays a role in the hierarchical ladders. One possible way that game might go is that women are slightly worse off than men who are otherwise the same in the kinds of things which determine the rung of the ladder we inhabit. If that's the case, then poor women could be slightly worse off than poor men, for instance.

Or perhaps not. The question is ultimately an empirical one and the studies must be done separately for each society. But that has been the traditional setting when it comes to comparing men and women and it is probably still valid in most countries of this world.

Beliefs about the proper roles of men and women and beliefs about women's worth have an impact on all members of the society, including its women. Seeing powerful women performing well in areas which have not traditionally allowed women that chance can change stereotypes and sexist beliefs. In that sense what happens at the very top of the society does matter to all women and men.

Those who argue that the problems with sexism otherwise privileged women have don't matter fail to understand that similar and worse problems affect women further down the ladders. Not studying those problems will hurt all women, ultimately.

I'm not sure how clear I have been. There's a difference between intersectionality and between the argument that feminism should be a social justice movement which supports every cause and all people.

Intersectionality plays a useful and important role. Turning feminism into some kind of a general social justice movement would leave the question of gender unexamined. Other social justice movements are unlikely to take up the slack.

This class of arguments also fails to appreciate that much feminist writing IS about intersectionality.

And to argue that some different cause (such as income inequality) is more important than feminism is to fail to take into account the intersectionality in that place. It also assumes that we must pick one cause and focus on that alone. I don't know about you but I can run and chew gum and plan my next blog post all at the same time.

Third Class of Arguments
These are the arguments that it is the men who are worse off in Western societies. Feminists are accused of not working to reduce the rates of male-on-male violence, including the rates of male suicide, or of not trying for the most dangerous jobs in equal numbers or of not working to get more fathers child custody in the case of a divorce.

Yet a very consistent tone in the orchestra that is feminist music has always focused on the evils that traditional gender roles can cause. A few examples:

Mothers are more likely to get custody in the case of a divorce when the society believes that mothers should do the hands-on care of the children. Stay-at-home parents are more likely to get custody than the family breadwinners, and the vast majority of stay-at-home parents are women. (It's a completely different question whether fathers, indeed, are treated especially unfairly in custody courts. Evidence suggests that in most cases the divorcing parents agree on who should have custody and when this is not the case, fathers win at least one half of all the cases in the US.)

Traditional definitions of masculinity have sometimes glorified violence. To the extent that feminism has opposed such definitions, it has also opposed one of the many causes for male-on-male violence.

The most dangerous traditionally male jobs do not always welcome women with open arms. Sexual harassment can be used as a way to defend one's turf. It's important to note that women don't necessarily make a simple choice not to become, say, firefighters. Also, as I've mentioned before, prostitution is probably the occupation with the highest risk of violent death, and it is a female-dominated occupation. But because it is often an illegal one, its riskiness does not enter occupational safety statistics.

It's a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't argument. Feminists should work hard on men's liberation because women have more "choices" than men do. But when feminists do suggest that men should be able to become stay-at-home-parents or that men should be encouraged to react to anger in ways other than violence, they become interfering bitches who disobey biological imperatives and so on. It's hard for me to know what some of these extremist MRA people want, because on the one hand they want feminists to work for the liberation of men and on the other hand they want the old-time gender roles to come back and feminists to shut up.

The best way to address these issues (in addition to getting the actual facts about them) is by pointing out that feminism wants equal opportunities by gender and equal valuation of traditionally male and female spheres of activity. Feminists who encourage women to take up the bread-winning role or who encourage women to become firefighters or police officers should please these types of MRA people, right? Because that way more women will die in the dangerous jobs and more men will be SAHDs and then get custody in the case of a divorce. Well, that last sentence is only half-serious. The point is that much of feminist agenda IS giving men more choices, should they want them.

Perhaps one could also mention that violence IS studied a lot in the society, and much of that study is about male-on-male violence. It's hard to see what input the feminist movement with its meager funds could contribute to what is already being done.

I have trouble with this group of argument because it veers from one end to the other. At one extreme, the argument is that the most traditional gender norms were the correct ones. At the other extreme, feminists should work to liberate men whom those traditional gender norms have enslaved.

Fourth Class of Arguments
This is another familiar one: The feminist movement was needed in the past (and perhaps still is, in places like Saudi Arabia) but women in the Western countries are now completely equal with men.

What makes the argument familiar is that people wrote about it earnestly in the late nineteenth century and then again in the 1930s and so on and so on. Makes you think, doesn't it?

Women in the West are certainly much better off now than, say, a hundred years ago. We can vote, for one thing. But the Church of England still won't have female bishops, the Catholic Church is an all-boys-club and so is Islam. The number of women in the parliaments of most countries is nowhere near 50%, sexual violence is still a problem and, most importantly, misogyny still manages to exist.

I'm grateful for the changes past generations of feminists spent their lives bringing about. Very grateful. But I don't think the job is over and done with. Whenever I feel like that, I go cruising on the net and get my head put right again. All it takes is participation in some poorly moderated forum while using a female-sounding pen-name. Or reading YouTube comments...

And as long as we are not affecting the gender roles at home we will not see ultimate gender equality in the wider society.

Conclusion

To conclude, let me state that, yes, some aspects of feminism have gone astray in the past, and, yes, there are always ways to make the social justice movement that is feminism more inclusive and more effective and fairer. At the same time, the feminism of the past got women the vote, fairer laws and fairer retirement benefits. It got women access to schools and colleges and jobs. It got women mentioned in the history books. It got women their own bank accounts and the right to enter contracts. It cast light on the once-common belief that rape is a shame for the victim and better kept hidden.

And today? We discuss how dirty a word "feminism" might be.

The paradox of my kind of feminism is this: The problems of sexism have been fixed when each individual is judged as an individual, not as a representative of a whole gender. Yet the only way to see the sexist treatment of any one individual is by looking at how it is affected by the beliefs and prejudices and societal practices which apply to one's whole gender.

That's what I have tried to do on this blog, over the years (send money!). It may not be the kind of feminism this Guardian article or the comments attached to it discuss. It may not even be feminism, who knows, and it may have very limited value. But from my snake's-eye-viewpoint most of the arguments classes I amassed miss the point of feminism, and it really is to remove that ankle-cuff with your sex etched on it. So that we can all run free or something.

The Church of England won't allow women to become bishops. The decision needed to pass in the three houses of the synod: bishops, priests and laity, and it needed to pass with at least two-thirds of the votes in each.

It was the laity which just failed to get that done. The vote was 132 in favor and 74 against.

It has been 36 years since the General Synod declared it had no fundamental objection to ordaining women as priests, and 18 years since the first women were ordained. But that change never won universal acceptance in the church, with a determined minority arguing that that the move was contrary to the Bible.

That group, affirming what it sees as the Biblical idea of male "headship," has demanded special arrangements to shield it from supervision by female bishops.

My bolds.

So it goes. Or as someone said, progress happens funeral by funeral. Perhaps the next generation gets this done.

What I rarely write about in my criticisms of the three big guy religions is the pain. There may be pain on the other side, too, but the pain of being declared as lesser by those who interpret the divine to you, that pain has a particular flavor. Different and deeper than the general pain caused by unmerited contempt.

The Church of England is the official church of the land, and the queen is its titular head. That makes me wonder how those opposed to any "supervision" by women explain her role away.

The practical implications of this decision for the women priests in the Church of England, a third of the total number, are that their career paths don't just have a glass ceiling as an obstacle. They have a tombstone to get through.

Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Many pregnant women indulge in an occasional—or even regular—glass of
wine and then worry that it might put their baby at a mental
disadvantage. A new study of more than 1,600 Danish five-year-old
children shows that these nonteetotaler moms can breathe a sigh of
relief.Kids whose mothers had up to eight drinks a week were just as smart
as their peers born to abstaining moms, according to the study, which
measured brainpower in several ways. Another common concern comes from
moms who had a “last blast”—a binge of five or more drinks—before
realizing they were pregnant. These women, too, can breathe easy; tots
whose moms had a binge episode early in pregnancy performed just as well
on the mental tasks.

I haven't read the actual study, so all this should be taken with a pinch of salt (assuming your physician agrees with that. Heh.).

But this seems mostly common sense. After all, women in Italy, Spain and France have drunk wine with meals for centuries. If very moderate drinking had a noticeable impact on the fetus then we should be able to see that effect in at least those three nations. And we don't.

His most recent column reminds me of a fish-head soup. You look for the floating heads because you try to avoid eating them. Brooks doesn't look for fish-heads but for new stars who might jump-start the wingnut movement by capturing certain working-class groups. This is the head I saw most clearly:

Lower-Middle Reformists. Reihan Salam, a writer for National Review, E21 and others, recently pointed out that there are two stories about where the Republican Party should go next. There is the upper-middle reform story: Republicans should soften their tone on the social issues to win over suburban voters along the coasts. Then there is a lower-middle reform story: Republicans should focus on the specific economic concerns of the multiethnic working class.Salam promotes the latter. This means acknowledging that working-class concerns are not what they were in the 1980s. The income tax is less burdensome than the payroll tax. Family disruption undermines social mobility. Republicans, he argues, should keep the social conservatism, which reinforces families, and supplement it with an agenda that supports upward mobility and social capital.

Bolds are mine.

In short, keep the patriarchy but let some of the men in that group share in the monetary benefits of the so-called free markets! This approach has been in the works for some time now.

It's salutary to be reminded of the fact that "family" is code for people like Brooks. It's not just any old family, however loving, nope. It's a traditional family, consisting of two parents of different sexes, children (preferably many) and the female-sex parent should be at home. All the costs of that family should be borne by the parents and many of the less obvious economic costs by the mother who will end up with less retirement earnings and lower lifetime earnings and so on.

From this angle "social conservatism" means making it harder for women not to be in that role. Hence the need to reduce access to contraception and abortions and hence also the need to make sure that parental leave is very short and that divorce is made difficult. It helps if labor market discrimination by gender is allowed, too.

It's all whip and no carrot for us wimminfolk in those scenarios.

Brooks brings out the worst in me because he disguises these horrors under all those tiny euphemisms. Real support for American families actually takes money. It would mean good and affordable daycare and health care, family friendly policies at work and in general societal arrangements which would let the parents of young children participate in at least some adult life. It would mean a real discussion about what causes divorces, a discussion about the stresses of working-class lives and a discussion about what was wrong with that traditional patriarchal marriage.

It's not enough to define "family" in such a vague manner that it no longer means anything. Why should anyone want to support an institution which is presented to us as cipher to be decoded?

I'm planning to do a light-and-frothy week, events permitting, on this here blog. It's the Thanksgiving week in the United States so most people are staring at turkeys rather than reading erudite dry-as-bran blog posts.

I am perfectly willing to admit that I myself am a classic case of female mental deficiencies. I can't add 2 and 2 (well, I can, but then what?). I don't even know how many pairs of shoes I own. I have coasted through life and academia on the basis of an excellent memory and superior verbal skills, two areas where, researchers agree, women consistently outpace men. (An evolutionary just-so story explains this facility of ours: Back in hunter-gatherer days, men were the hunters and needed to calculate spear trajectories, while women were the gatherers and needed to remember where the berries were.) I don't mind recognizing and accepting that the women in history I admire most -- Sappho, Hildegard of Bingen, Elizabeth I, George Eliot, Margaret Thatcher -- were brilliant outliers.The same goes for female fighter pilots, architects, tax accountants, chemical engineers, Supreme Court justices and brain surgeons. Yes, they can do their jobs and do them well, and I don't think anyone should put obstacles in their paths. I predict that over the long run, however, even with all the special mentoring and role-modeling the 21st century can provide, the number of women in these fields will always lag behind the number of men, for good reason.So I don't understand why more women don't relax, enjoy the innate abilities most of us possess (as well as the ones fewer of us possess) and revel in the things most important to life at which nearly all of us excel: tenderness toward children and men and the weak and the ability to make a house a home. (Even I, who inherited my interior-decorating skills from my Bronx Irish paternal grandmother, whose idea of upgrading the living-room sofa was to throw a blanket over it, can make a house a home.) Then we could shriek and swoon and gossip and read chick lit to our hearts' content and not mind the fact that way down deep, we are . . . kind of dim.

To put that 2008 column in perspective: Something similar would never have been published by the Post if it was about African-Americans, Latinos or other minority groups. Never. And had it somehow gotten through the editing process, its author would have been over as an author, for good.

Not so with Charlotte Allen! She could come back and opine that all women (ALL WOMEN) dress as sluts for Halloween. And now she can come back and propose a woman for president of the United States who isn't well prepared for that job, and nobody asks what the f**k this is all about. If Allen thinks all women are dim, why propose a woman at all? And if Allen thinks all women are dim, why is she out there opining?

The Hostess bankruptcy case is an excellent chance for all of us to get in on the ground floor into the fact/factoid elevator/lift! Because in a very, very short time you can tell a person's political stance from what that person believes the reason for the bankruptcy must be. That's my prediction, unless strong evidence pointing to a single main cause crops up shortly.

Irving, Texas-based Hostess filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy
protection in January for the second time in less than a decade. Its
predecessor company, Interstate Bakeries, sought bankruptcy protection
in 2004 and changed its name to Hostess after emerging in 2009.The
company said it was saddled with costs related to its unionized
workforce. The company had been contributing $100 million a year in
pension costs for workers; the new contract offer would’ve slashed that
to $25 million a year, in addition to wage cuts and a 17 percent
reduction in health benefits.Management missteps were another
problem. Hostess came under fire this spring after it was revealed that
nearly a dozen executives received pay hikes of up to 80 percent last
year even as the company was struggling.

Republicans are going to go for the unions as the evil destroyer, Democrats probably for the evil management missteps which were, nevertheless, rewarded.

I haven't done the necessary research to say anything more meaningful about the causes of the bankruptcy, although selling something akin to the dwarf bread in Terry Pratchett's fantasy books might be a biiiig part of company's troubles, given that people are getting more health conscious and so on.

Sorry for the aside. The point is that there's a very narrow window before the beliefs about a particular event ossify**. Sorta like Twinkies. This happened with the mortgage crisis, for example, so that after some time had passed it was impossible to agree on the facts of the case across the political aisle.

-------
*The title is based on the legal use of this term. Twinkies are one of the products of the bankrupt company.
**Might not happen with this example, but it happens a lot recently, and that fact/factoid ossification makes real debate about many political issues essentially impossible. It's as if we all have our separate holy books.

Sunday, November 18, 2012

This, by Michael Calleri, a movie critic, is an interesting take on that question. It begins with the purchase of a small newspaper by someone with strong views on masculinity and traditional gender roles. The events, according to Calleri?

As often happens in life, things change. Editor Hudson, a mercurial guy in his mid-fifties, wanted something different. His wife was the managing editor of the Reporter, and he had a loyal staff of talented writers, including a couple of Pulitzer Prize winners he knew, who contributed the occasional column. But Hudson was discontent. He had created a weekly newspaper that shook the status quo. The team at the Gazette weren't happy with Hudson and the Reporter. The citizens of Niagara Falls were so enamored with Hudson's paper that its power grew. The city's government often printed many legally required public notices in the Reporter. If you are unaware, legal notices are a huge source of income for newspapers. The feisty little weekly was, for many, the heart and soul of communications in Niagara Falls. The newspaper's fans in Buffalo were equally enamored. Soon Niagara Falls would have its heart broken. In late 2011 and early 2012, Hudson took a sabbatical and went to Los Angeles to recharge his creative juices. This being the era of long-distance editing by computer, he continued to oversee the newspaper's content, ably assisted by his wife and other members of the Reporter's team. Los Angeles wove its spell over Hudson. Yes, it's the old story about pastures being greener on the other side of the fence. Hudson fell in love with the southern California lifestyle. He decided to stay. His wife was in Niagara Falls putting out the paper with the rest of the staff. As time passed, his marriage fragmented, and he sold the Reporter to a new owner whose journalistic experience could fit into a peanut shell. As a prospective publisher, the new guy's only genuine association with professional journalism was that he read newspapers. But, this new man was a political and sociological firebrand with a point-of-view all his own. And a rather charged point-of-view at that. Over a short period of time, the pages of the Niagara Falls Reporter went from being an avenue for a variety of expressions and a fact-based gadfly to City Hall--to its being a nasty, mean-spirited, hyperactive assault on sensible interaction with city government. Suddenly the pages of the Niagara Falls Reporter, once a well-respected weekly that people sought out and generally enjoyed reading, were filled with sexism, racism, the mockery of immigrants, the condemnation of gay men and lesbian women, crude demeaning political tirades, and poorly-written, loopy cultural points-of-view that drew attention, but lacked depth and a coherent understanding of the history and progression of the cultural touchstones being discussed.

I continued to write for the Reporter, which under its new owner was slowly altering its content. Perhaps he was feeling his wings, or perhaps he had the complexities of running a new business to occupy his mind, but I was still in print. I soon noticed something disconcerting. The Reporter's two important female staffers, the managing editor (the wife of the founder/editor) and the senior editor no longer had their names on the masthead.

Proper gender roles coming back? When Calleri asks the owner more questions about how his movie reviews disapper, he gets a long e-mail back. Snippets from it:

Michael; I know you are committed to writing your reviews, and put a lot of effort into them. it is important for you to have the right publisher. i may not be it. i have a deep moral objection to publishing reviews of films that offend me. snow white and the huntsman is such a film. when my boys were young i would never have allowed them to go to such a film for i believe it would injure their developing manhood. if i would not let my own sons see it, why would i want to publish anything about it?snow white and the huntsman is trash. moral garbage. a lot of fuzzy feminist thinking and pandering to creepy hollywood mores produced by metrosexual imbeciles. I don't want to publish reviews of films where women are alpha and men are beta.where women are heroes and villains and men are just lesser versions or shadows of females. i believe in manliness.

...

with all the publications in the world who glorify what i find offensive, it should not be hard for you to publish your reviews with any number of these. they seem to like critiques from an artistic standpoint without a word about the moral turpitude seeping into the consciousness of young people who go to watch such things as snow white and get indoctrinated to the hollywood agenda of glorifying degenerate power women and promoting as natural the weakling, hyena -like men, cum eunuchs. the male as lesser in courage strength and power than the female. it may be ok for some but it is not my kind of manliness.

Turns out that Parlato hasn't seen the movies he criticizes. But nevermind! His is the subtractive concept of masculinity which defines what men are by what women are not. This creates a never-ending war of the sexes, and our Frank has proudly taken his side in this battle.

Here's an interesting question: Could someone like Frank Parlato ever do hiring without coming a cropper? How could someone with those values avoid promoting women legally? Getting them off the masthead is one thing; getting them off the paper a whole different ballgame.

As an aside, Parlato sounds exactly like all those weird-type MRA guys on the hate sites whose views on a fair society hinge on the concept of subtractive masculinity and the unfairness of everything which doesn't allow all men to be ranked higher than all women.

As a second aside: Snow-White as degenerate feminist thinking! My stomach hurts, from the laughing. But Parlato's point is perhaps that there shouldn't be any movies about women at all, not even movies based on a fairy tale where the only powerful woman is pure evil and where the heroine spends a lot of time apparently dead and the rest of the time passive.

American
feminist writing is often not given its due alongside the writing of
other social justice movements - writing by Martin Luther King and
Rachel Carson, for example. I think it is important to look at feminist
writing not only within the context of its time but as part of a
movement no less grand and noble than the movements for other types of
social justice, such as racial equality and environmentalism. Therefore,
I have made this canon of American feminist writing, which I have taken
from my larger "feminist literary canon" series.

Judith Sargent Murray (1751–1820)
was an early American advocate for women's rights, an essayist,
playwright, poet, and letter writer. In her landmark essay "On the
Equality of the Sexes," published in the Massachusetts Magazine in
1790, she claimed that women’s seeming inferiority to men was due to
their lack of education, not any inherent defect. Alice Rossi's book The Feminist Papers starts with Murray's essay. The essay can be read in its entirety in English here: http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/murray/equality/equality.html

Sarah Margaret Fuller Ossoli, commonly known as Margaret Fuller (1810 – 1850) was an American journalist, critic, and women's rights advocate. Her book Woman in the Nineteenth Century,
published in 1845, is considered the first major feminist work in the
United States.

Some scholars have suggested Woman in the Nineteenth
Century was the first major women's rights work since Mary
Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in
1792, beginning with a comparison between the two women made by Mary
Ann Evans (pen name George Eliot) in her 1855 essay "Margaret Fuller and
Mary Wollstonecraft.”

A shorter version of the Woman in the Nineteenth Century had been published in 1843 in serial form for the Transcendentalist magazine The Dial, which Fuller edited; it was then called "The Great Lawsuit: Man 'versus' Men, Woman 'versus' Women."The
book declared that marriage should be a union between two independent
and self-sufficient individuals, rather than having the woman dependent
on the man. Fuller thought that equality between men and women would
enable them to share a divine and transcendental love.Woman in the Nineteenth Centurycan be read in its entirety in English here: http://transcendentalism.tamu.edu/authors/fuller/woman1.html

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815
–1902) was a leader of the women’s suffrage movement in America, as
well as an advocate for divorce reform, birth control, women's parental
and custody rights, women’s property rights, and women’s employment and
income rights. She was the main writer of the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions, which was presented at the first American women's rights convention, held in 1848 in Seneca Falls, New York.

It
was based on the form of the Declaration of Independence, and caused
much controversy, particularly with its support of women’s suffrage,
which even many women’s rights supporters thought was too radical and
would damage other causes such as women’s property rights. Furthermore, her controversial publishing of The Woman's Bible in
1898 (a feminist criticism of the Bible, written by herself and a
“Revising Committee”) alienated many religious suffragists, although
criticism of sexism in the Bible would become more popular in the 1970s,
when much of Stanton’s writing was rediscovered. Stanton declared in The Woman's Bible that
the Bible "in its teachings degrades Women from Genesis to
Revelations." However she and the other contributors found some things
to admire in the Bible, particularly some of the women in the Old
Testament.

Kate Chopin,
born Katherine O'Flaherty (1850 –1904) was an American author of short
stories and novels. She is considered by many to be a forerunner of
feminist authors of the 20th century.

Her short story "The Story of An
Hour" (1894) is particularly remarkable in that it shows a woman made
happy by her husband’s death due to the oppression of her marriage, a
very daring statement for the time. The Awakening (1899)
is also a story of a woman made unhappy by her marriage, which features
frank (for its time) depictions of female sexual desire, even outside
of marriage. Reviews ranged from condemnation to praise, though the
public reaction was almost completely opposed.

She never published
another novel, and had difficulties even publishing short stories, but The Awakening is
now considered a landmark of feminist literature. Furthermore, Chopin
was recognized as one of the leading writers of her time within a decade
of her death. The Story of An Hour can be read in its entirety in English here: http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/webtexts/hour/

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (July 3, 1860 – August 17, 1935) was a prominent American sociologist, writer, and lecturer for social reform. Her best remembered work today is her semi-autobiographical short story The Yellow Wallpaper (1892)
which she wrote after a severe bout of postpartum psychosis. It
concerns a woman who is confined to a room for three months for the sake
of her health, and who becomes insane as a result; Gilman herself had
endured the then-popular “rest cure” as a treatment for her post-partum
psychosis, and felt she had come near to losing her own sanity. She sent
Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, who had prescribed the rest cure for her, a copy
of the story. She claimed he had changed his methods as a result of
this, but in fact (possibly unknown to her) he had not.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote many other feminist works which have not been as popular as The Yellow Wallpaper. Her greatest work is often considered to be Women and Economics (1898), in which she described and opposed women’s financial dependence on men. In
order to end this, she was one of the first to support the
professionalization of housework, to be done by housekeepers and cooks
for money rather than by mothers for nothing. She also suggested
cooperative kitchens in city apartment buildings where cooking would be
shared rather than being the private chore of each family. However, she
still insisted that motherhood was “the common duty and the common glory
of womanhood,” and that women would choose “professions compatible with
motherhood.”

Women and Economics received
overwhelmingly positive reviews and caused Gilman to be considered the
leading intellectual of the women’s movement. It was even compared
favorably to The Subjection of Women.
However, Gilman did not call herself a feminist, as she was very
uncomfortable with the ideas of sexual liberation that had become an
important part of feminist thought.The Yellow Wallpapercan be read in its entirety in English here: http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept/history/lavender/wallpaper.html

Valerie Saiving Goldstein (1921-1992) was a feminist theologian. She is best known for "The Human Situation: A Feminine View" (1960),
in which she criticized the Christian focus on pride as a sin, noting
that many women struggle much more with feelings of self-doubt.

She
noted that much of Christian theology was written by men and based on
male experience, and might not apply to women, and that women would have
to write out their own theology. Her essay had a strong influence on
other feminist theologians. Mary Daly for example, cited her in her own
book The Church and the Second Sex,
while Judith Plaskow, a Jewish feminist theologian, both published a
dissertation on Saiving's essay (entitled “Sex, Sin and Grace: Women’s
Experience and the Theologies of Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich”) and
reproduced the 1960 article in her own anthology Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion.

"The Human Situation: A Feminine View” can be read in its entirety in English here: https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:NT-adx9hHJwJ:hebe.sjsu.edu/upload/course/course_2055/Saiving_Article.pdf+"human+situation:+a+feminine+view"&h

Betty Friedan (February 4, 1921 - February 4, 2006) was a leading feminist activist. Her best-known book is The Feminine Mystique (1963), which is widely credited with sparking the beginning of the second-wave feminist movement in the United States. In
it she criticized the fact that women were encouraged to see
housewifery as a career, and declared that women needed a purpose in
life separate from their children and husbands. She also praised what we
would now consider the first wave of feminism, which won the vote for
women, and decried how popular culture had made feminism seem ridiculous
and cold-hearted, or alternately insisted that all battles for women
had been won.

The Feminine Mystique was
extremely influential in the feminist movement, although it was
criticized by later waves of feminism for its focus on upper-class
housewives to the exclusion of the problems of other women. Still, the
fact that most women were not fulfilled by full-time housework and
should not be ashamed of their career dreams was a true and important
point. The Feminine Mystique
is also criticized for its homophobia – Friedan believed that
homosexuality was at least in part caused by overbearing mothers – but
it should be noted that this was an entirely mainstream idea at the
time.

Friedan
is also noted for co-writing"The National Organization for Women's
Statement of Purpose" (1966) with feminist and civil rights activist
Pauli Murray (1910-1985). Murray and Friedan both helped found the
organization and Friedan was its first president. "The National
Organization for Women's Statement of Purpose" is notable for its
idealism; it declared that the goal of the National Organization for
Women was “to take action to bring women into full participation in the
mainstream of American society now, exercising all the privileges and
responsibilities thereof in truly equal partnership with men,” and
elaborated that women should have equal rights and responsibilities with
men in all fields.

Chapter 1 of The Feminine Mystique can be read in its entirety in English here: https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:GAOxcm1Sjx8J:www.athensacademy.net/teachers/rreid/apushistory/The%2520Feminine%2520Mystique.doc+feminine+mystique+chapter+1&hl=en

Chapter 2 of The Feminine Mystique can be read in its entirety in English here: https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:TB4J7gLWHwIJ:ls.poly.edu/~jbain/socphil/texts/05a.Friedan.pdf+feminine+mystique+chapter+2&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srci

Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (1960-1970s)
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee emerged from a series of
student meetings held by civil rights activist Ella Baker in 1960. The
“Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Position Paper: Women in the
Movement” (1964), was written and submitted anonymously at the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee meeting in Waveland, Mississippi. It
denounced the sexism of the Committee and called for the civil rights
movement to “start the slow process of changing values and ideas so that
all of us gradually come to understand that this is no more a man's
world than it is a white world.” The “Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Position Paper: Women in the Movement” can be read in its entirety in English here: http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Manifestos/SNCC_women.html

Casey Hayden (born Sandra Cason) and Mary King (birthdate
unknown, both still alive) are left-wing activists. Their most noted
feminist writing is “Sex and Caste – A Kind of Memo” (1965) which was
based on their experiences as Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
volunteers. It is widely regarded as one of the first documents of the
emerging second-wave feminist movement. In it they described and
denounced the sexism of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee,
which was common in left-wing movements at the time, and woke many women
up to the fact that while they were ostensibly working for freedom and
justice, they themselves were being oppressed.

Gloria Steinem (born
1934) is an feminist, journalist, and political activist, and is widely
known as a spokesperson for feminism. In 1969 she published the
article, "After Black Power, Women's Liberation" which, along with her
early support of abortion rights, brought her to national fame as a
feminist leader. This article describes early feminist actions (such as
demonstrations in favor of coed dorms and against bridal fairs) and how
sexism in left wing movements led to second-wave feminism as a separate
and distinct movement, and sparked women thinking of themselves as a
minority group, just as African-Americans are. The article concludes,
however, with the assurance that "women's liberation will be men's
liberation too", perhaps an acknowledgement that if feminism could not
be made appealing to the men in charge it would not advance.

Naomi Weisstein (born
1939) is a psychology professor, and a co-founder of American Women in
Psychology, now Division 35 of the American Psychological Association.

She
is probably best known for her pioneering essay, "Kinder, Küche, Kirche
as Scientific Law: Psychology Constructs the Female," which was first
published in 1968, and was read by activists throughout the feminist
movement, as well as psychologists. The
title is taken from the German slogan Kinder, Küche, Kürche (meaning
children, kitchen, church), describing what the Nazis believed was the
proper domain of a woman. The paper, which has been reprinted over 42
times in six different languages, is a seminal paper in feminist
psychology, criticizing psychologists for promoting stereotypes about
women, and buttressing its conclusions with unproven theories and
inapplicable biological research (shades of evolutionary psychology.) "
It further criticizes psychology in general for not taking into account
how much social context affects a person's feelings and actions.

Frances M. Beal (born
1940) is a political activist. She is perhaps best known for writing
"Double Jeopardy: To Be Black & Female," first published in 1969.
This paper criticizes the oppression of all black people by racism, but
also criticizes the oppression of black women by sexism, even within the
the civil rights movement, which often tried to build black men up by
putting women down.

Beal
declared that this was a "counter-revolutionary position" and that
blacks should be fighting for the end of all kinds of oppression, an
endeavor which she notes will require everyone's help, women as well as
men. She also blames capitalist exploitation for keeping black men in
menial jobs and encouraging black women to strive for the life of a
full-time housewife. She ends by declaring that revolutionaries against
racism and capitalism must treat each other as equals, and that all are
needed in the struggle.

The National Organization for Women (founded
1966) adopted the "National Organization for Women (N.O.W.) Bill of
Rights" at its national conference in 1967, and published it in 1968. It
is a sweeping document that shows how ambitious the feminist movement
had become, and advocates for many things (such as removing all laws
limiting access to contraceptive information and devices and laws
governing abortion, and establishing national child care facilities)
that still have not become law.

Carol Hanisch (birthdate
unknown) is best known for coming up with the idea to have a feminist
protest of the 1968 Miss America pageant (which first brought feminist
concerns to the attention of the mainstream media) and for writing The Personal Is Political, which
was published in 1969 and coined the phrase. In this paper she argues
that women and other oppressed people should stop blaming themselves for
their problems and realize that those problems are often caused by
oppression and have political solutions.

Del Martin (1921-2008) is
best known as an LGBT rights activist, but she also fought for women’s
rights. She was active in the National Organization for Women, and
wrote Battered Wives, showing how institutionalized misogyny contributed to domestic violence. In 1970 she wrote If That’s All There Is, an indictment of the sexism in the LGBT rights movement.

Adrienne Rich (1929 –2012)was
an American poet, and essayist, called "one of the most widely read and
influential poets of the second half of the 20th century", and was credited with bringing "the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse.”

In her 1980 essay Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence, Rich, herself a lesbian, posits that many women are forced into heterosexuality through women's
dependence on men for money and status, violence, denial of knowledge
about lesbianism, and so forth. She further declares that sexual
repression of women has also stifled women’s creativity and economic
advancement through rendering them dependent on men.

Whether one agrees with all this or not, this is an important document in the history of feminism, and its concept
has been accepted and embraced in many college classes and by human
rights activists. As one example of its scope, the International
Tribunal on Crimes Against Women, held in Brussels, March 4-8, 1976,
named compulsory heterosexuality (in the form of discrimination against
and persecution of lesbians) as a "crime against women."The essay can be read in its entirety in English here: http://www.terry.uga.edu/~dawndba/4500compulsoryhet.htm

Linda Nochlin (born 1931) Linda Nochlin is an art historian, professor and writer, best known for her 1971 essay Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?

In this essay, which has become very influential in the field of art history, she argues
that general social expectations against women seriously pursuing art,
restrictions on educating women at art academies, and "the entire
romantic, elitist, individual-glorifying, and monograph-producing
substructure upon which the profession of art history is based" have
worked against women becoming great artists.She also argues that
the idea of a lone great artist is somewhat exaggerated, as many have
been supported by the help of assistants, patrons, schooling, etc, and
have not simply created works of genius alone and unprovoked.

You can
read the essay in its entirety in
English
here: https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:RZfpIKWTTd0J:f.hypotheses.org/wp-content/blogs.dir/512/files/2012/01/whynogreatwomenartists_4.pdf+"why+have+their+

Anne Koedt (born 1941 in Denmark, moved to America in her youth) is best known as the author of The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm, first published in 1970. In this essay, building on the work of Masters and Virginia Johnson’s Human Sexual Response Koedt
advocated new sexual techniques mutually conducive to orgasm and urged
women to insist on their own sexual satisfaction. She noted that
penis-in-vagina sex (as opposed to oral sex, etc) that does not involve
clitoris stimulation often results in women not having orgasms, and
encouraged women to consider sex without their pleasure to be as
unthinkable as sex without his penis being touched or him having an
orgasm, an idea which mainstream society still has not adopted.

Robin Morgan (born 1941) was a child actor and writer. She edited the 1970 anthology Sisterhood is Powerful,
which has been widely credited with helping to start the general
women's movement in the US, and was cited by the New York Public Library
as "One of the 100 most influential Books of the 20th Century.” It was
one of the first widely available anthologies of second-wave feminism.
Also in 1970, she wrote Goodbye to All That in reaction to the misogyny of the male-dominated left, in particular a magazine called Rat. The
essay gained notoriety in the press for naming sexist liberal men and
institutions. It can be read in its entirety in English here: http://blog.fair-use.org/2007/09/29/goodbye-to-all-that-by-robin-morgan-1970/

Rabbi Rachel Adler (born 1943) is a professor and theologian, ordained as a rabbi in May 2012.In 1971 she published The Jew Who Wasn’t There:Halacha and the Jewish Woman, in which she argued that halacha (Jewish religious law) ignored and oppressed women. This essay was considered by historian Paula Hyman as one of the founding influences of the Jewish feminist movement. It can be read in its entirety in English here: https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:_aHy1mQXk-wJ:jwa.org/feminism/_html/_pdf/JWA001c.pdf+jew+who+wasn't+there&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESgKmt25OwE0fl_Yilu_Ayd2XrtUpxtH

Carol P. Christ (born 1944) is a teacher and author. Her speech Why Women Need the Goddesswas
presented as the keynote address to an audience of over 500 at the
"Great Goddess Re-emerging" conference at the University of Santa Cruz
in the spring of 1978, and was first published later that year. It has
since been widely reprinted. In this speech she argues in favor of the concept of there having been an ancient religion of a supreme Goddess. The speech can be read in its entirety in English here: http://www.goddessariadne.org/whywomenneedthegoddess.htm

Alice Walker (born 1944) is an author and activist. In 1974 she wrote In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: The Creativity of Black Women in the South in
which she argued that black women’s artistic and literary gifts had
been suppressed, and that there was a hidden history of oppressed black
women artists. This essay can be read in its entirety in English here: http://www.msmagazine.com/spring2002/walker.asp

Her 1975 nonfiction article In Search of Zora Neale Hurston, published in Ms. magazine, helped revive interest in the work of Zora Neale Hurston (a feminist author best known for Their Eyes Were Watching God), who inspired some of Walker's writing and subject matter. In the article told of her journey
to central Florida, where Hurston lived, hoping to find anyone who knew
her and thus fill in the missing details of her life. When she arrived,
Walker realized that few had heard of Hurston or read her works, nor
had they properly honored her after she died. Posing as her niece,
Walker made her way to Hurston’s weed-covered grave and purchased a
headstone with the engraving: “A Genius of the South, 1901 – 1960.
Novelist, Folklorist, Anthropologist”. This article is widely available
in English but is not available online.

In 1982 she published The Color Purple,
which focuses on the life on black women in the 1930s in the United
States, and includes themes of lesbianism and feminism. It is widely
considered a feminist classic.

In this book Walker
portrays female friendships as a means for women to summon the courage
to tell stories which allow women to resist oppression and dominance.
Relationships among women form a refuge, providing reciprocal love in a
world filled with male violence. The novel also shows the limitations of
gender roles. In 1983 she publishedIn Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose,
a collection composed of thirty-six separate pieces. In this book she
coins the word "womanist", which she defines as, "A black feminist or
feminist of color. From the black folk expression of mother to female
children and also a woman who loves other women, sexually and/or
nonsexually. Appreciates and prefers women's culture. Committed to
survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female." This has
become a popular and influential concept among feminist women of color.
The piece In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens, about the hidden creativity of black American women,can be read in its entirety in English here: http://www.msmagazine.com/spring2002/walker.asp

Ezrat Nashim (founded 1971) was a Jewish feminist group. The name refers to the women’s section in a traditional synagogue, but also can mean "women's help."In 1972 theytook
the issue of equality for women to the 1972 convention of Conservative
Judaism’s Rabbinical Assembly, presenting a document on 14 March that
was titled Jewish Women Call for a Change. The rabbis received the document in their convention packets, but Ezrat Nashim also
presented it during a meeting with the rabbis' wives.

The document
demanded that women be accepted as witnesses before Jewish law, be
considered as bound to perform all mitzvot (commandments),, be allowed
full participation in religious observances, have equal rights in
marriage and be allowed to initiate divorce, be counted in the minyan
(religious quorum), and be permitted to assume positions of leadership
in the synagogue and within the general Jewish community.Historian Paula Hyman, who was a member of Ezrat Nashim, wrote that: "We recognized that the subordinate status of women was linked to their exemption from positive time-bound mitzvot,
and we therefore accepted increased obligation as the corollary of
equality.”

Eleven years later, in October 1983, the Jewish Theological
Seminary, the main educational institution of the Conservative movement,
announced its decision to accept women into the Rabbinical School.
Hyman took part in the vote as a member of the JTS faculty. Today,
women are ordained as rabbis and cantors, and can read from the Torah
in front of the congregation and be counted in the minyan, have full
participation in religious observances, and be accepted as witnesses
before Jewish law, in all types of Judaism except Orthodox Judaism.

The Combahee River Collective (founded 1974)was a black feminist lesbian group. Their name commemorated
an action at Combahee River planned and led by Harriet Tubman in 1863,
which freed more than 750 slaves and is the only military campaign in
American history planned and led by a woman.In 1977 they publishedA Black Feminist Statement,a
key document in the history of contemporary black feminism and the
development of the concepts of identity as used among political
organizers and social theorists.
It describes the importance of black feminism, the difficulties in
organizing black feminists, the realities of interlocking oppressions,
and racism in the mainstream women’s movement. The essay can be read in
its entirety in English here: http://circuitous.org/scraps/combahee.html

Audre Lorde (1934-1992) was a Caribbean-Americanlesbian writer, poet, librarian, and activist. Lorde
criticized feminists of the 1960s for focusing on the particular
experiences and values of white middle-class women.

Her writings are
based on the "theory of difference", the idea that the binary opposition
between men and women is overly simplistic: although feminists have
found it necessary to present the illusion of a solid, unified whole,
the category of women itself is full of subdivisions.

Among other works,
Lorde wrote The Cancer Journals (1980), in
which she describes her experience with cancer and calls on the reader
to relinquish silence and speak out. She focuses on the importance of
the love received from the women around her throughout her experience,
and the comfort from talking about it with other lesbian cancer
survivors. She also discusses coming to terms with the outcome of the
operation, which left her with one breast. She explains that although it
would be fine for women to resort to a prosthesis if they want to, she
chooses not to, thinking that it seems like a cover-up in a society
where women are solely judged on their looks. She also discusses the
possibilities of alternative medicine, arguing that women should look at
all the options.

Her book Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982) began a new genre known as biomythography, a term she coined which means the
weaving together of myth, history, and biography in epic narrative
form, a style of composition meant to represent all the ways in which we
perceive the world around us. In Zami, Lorde discusses her upbringing and early life. The
book describes the way lesbians lived in NYC, Connecticut, and Mexico.
It also discusses Lorde's difficult relationship with her mother, whom
she credits for imbuing her with a certain sense of strength; the book
ends with a homage to her. Zami is a Caribbean name for women who work
together as friends and lovers.

In one of Lorde's most famous essays, "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House" from Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984), she
attacks the underlying racism of feminism, describing it as
unrecognized dependence on the patriarchy. She argues that, by denying
difference in the category of women, feminists merely passed on old
systems of oppression and that, in so doing, they were preventing any
real, lasting change. Her argument aligns white feminists with white
male slave-masters, describing both as "agents of oppression."

Gloria Anzaldúa (1942-2004) was an American scholar of Chicano cultural theory, queer theory, and feminist theory.

She is most famous for co-editing This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color (1981) with Cherrie Moraga.

This anthology explores
the feminist revolution from the perspective of women of color and
addresses the cultural, class, and sexual differences that impact them.
It includes Anzaldúa's
speech called "Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women
Writers" (1981), focusing on the shift towards an equal and just gender
representation in literature, but away from racial and cultural issues
due to the rise of female writers and theorists.

She
also stresses in her speech the power of writing to create a world
which would compensate for what the real world does not offer us.
AnzaldÃºa has introduced the term "mestizaje" to United States academic
audiences, meaning a state of being beyond binary (either-or)
understanding. In her theoretical works, Anzaldúa calls
for a "new mestiza," which she describes as an individual aware of her
conflicting and meshing identities and uses these "new angles of vision"
to challenge binary thinking. This "new mestiza" way of thinking is
part of postcolonial feminism. In "La Conciencia de la Mestiza: Towards a
New Consciousness" (1987), a text often used in women's studies, Anzaldúa insists
that separatism for Chicanas and Chicanos is not furthering the cause,
but instead keeping the same racial division in place.

Andrea Dworkin (1946-2005) was an American author. During
the late 1970s and the 1980s, she gained national fame as a spokeswoman
for the feminist anti-pornography movement, and for her writing on
pornography and sexuality, particularly in Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981) and Intercourse (1987), which remain her two most widely known books.In Pornography: Men Possessing Women she argues
that pornography and erotic literature in patriarchal societies
consistently eroticize women's sexual subordination to men, and often
overt acts of exploitation or violence.

In Intercourse,
she went on to argue that that sort of sexual subordination is central
to men's and women's experiences of sexual intercourse in male
supremacist society, and reinforced throughout mainstream culture,
including not only pornography but also in classic works of male-centric
literature. Dworkin argues that the depictions of intercourse in
mainstream art and culture consistently emphasize heterosexual
intercourse as the only or the most genuine form of "real" sex; that
they portray intercourse in violent or invasive terms; that they portray
the violence or invasiveness as central to its eroticism; and that they
often unite it with male contempt for, revulsion towards, or even
murder of, the "carnal" woman.

bell hooks (aka
Gloria Jean Watkins, born 1952) is an American author and activist. She
took her pen name, which is intentionally uncapitalized, from her
grandmother Bell Blair Hooks. She chose this because
her grandmother "was known for her snappy and bold tongue, which I
greatly admired." She put the name in lowercase letters "to distinguish
myself from my grandmother." Her name's unconventional lowercasing
signifies what is most important in her works: the "substance of books,
not who I am."

Her first major work Ain't I a Woman?: Black women and feminism (1981) examines
the historical impact of sexism and racism on black women, devaluation
of black womanhood, media roles and portrayal, the education system, the
idea of a white-supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy, the marginalization
of black women, and the disregard for issues of race and class within
feminism.

In 1984 she published Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center,which confirmed
her importance as a leader in radical feminist thought. Throughout the
book, hooks uses the term white-supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy as a
lens through which to both critique various aspects of American culture
and to offer potential solutions to the problems she explores.

hooks
addresses topics including the goals of feminist movement, the role of
men in feminist struggle, the relevance of pacifism, solidarity among
women, and the nature of revolution. hooks can be identified in her
discussions of these topics as a radical feminist because of her
arguments that the system itself is corrupt and that achieving equality
in such a system is neither possible nor desirable. She promotes instead
a complete transformation of society and all of its institutions as a
result of protracted struggle, envisioning a life-affirming, peaceful
tomorrow. A second edition of this book, featuring a new preface,
"Seeing the Light: Visionary Feminism," was published in 2000. In the
preface to the first edition, hooks, talking about black Americans in
her hometown, discusses the meaning of her title From Margin to Center: "Living
as we did "on the edge" we developed a particular way of seeing
reality. We looked from both the outside in and the inside out. We
focused our attention on the center as well as the margin. We understood
both. This mode of seeing reminded us of the existence of a whole
universe, a main body made up of both margin and center."

Hillary Clinton (born
1947) is an American politician. In 1995 her speech at the 1995 UN
Conference on Women, called Women’s Rights are Human Rights (1995)
showed her “speaking
more forcefully on human rights than any American dignitary has on
Chinese soil” as the NY Times put it. It is often considered one of the landmark speeches in the global struggle for women’s rights, and condemns all abuses of women wherever they occur. It can be read in its entirety in English here: http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/hillaryclintonbeijingspeech.htm

Eve Ensler (born May 25, 1953) is an American playwright, performer, feminist, activist and artist, best known for her play The Vagina Monologues. This
play is made up of various feminist monologues centering around women’s
experiences with their vaginas, based on interviews Ensler did with
various women.

However, it has come in for some criticism, mostly
due to the monologue "The Little Coochie Snorcher that Could", in which
an underage girl (thirteen in earlier performances, sixteen in the
revised version) recounts being given alcohol and then having sex with
an adult woman; the incident is recalled fondly by the grown girl, who
in the original version of the play calls it "a good rape." This
monologue is omitted from some versions.

In 1998, Ensler’s experience performing The Vagina Monologues inspired her to create V-Day, a global activist movement to stop violence against women and girls. V-Day raises funds and awareness through annual benefit productions of The Vagina Monologues, and has raised over $800,000,000 so far.

Susan Faludi (born April 18, 1959) is an American journalist and author. Faludi's 1991 book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women argues
that the 1980s saw a backlash against feminism in America, especially
due to the spread of negative stereotypes against career-focused women.
Faludi asserts that many who argue "a woman's place is in the home,
looking after the kids" are hypocrites, since they have wives who are
working mothers or, as women, they are themselves working mothers. This
work won her the National Book Critics Circle Award for general
nonfiction in 1991.

Naomi Wolf (born 1962) is an American author and former political consultant. She is most famous for the book The Beauty Myth (1991) which argues that as
women have gained increased social power and prominence, expected
adherence to standards of physical beauty has grown stronger for women.
that "beauty" as a normative value is entirely socially constructed, and
that the patriarchy determines the content of that construction with
the goal of reproducing its own hegemony.

Rebecca Walker (born November 17, 1969) is an American writer. She
co-founded the Third Wave Foundation, which aims to encourage young
women to get involved in activism and leadership roles. The organization
now provides grants to individuals and projects that support young
women. Walker is considered one of the founding leaders of third-wave feminism. She wrote an article for Ms. Magazine called Becoming the Third Wave (1991),
criticizing the confirmation of Clarence Thomas as a Supreme Court
justice after he was accused of sexually harassing his employee Anita
Hill. Using this example, Walker addresses the oppression of the female
voice and introduces the concept of third-wave feminism, a term her
article coined. Walker defines third wave feminism at the end of the
article by saying “To be a feminist is to integrate an ideology of
equality and female empowerment into the very fiber of life. It is to
search for personal clarity in the midst of systemic destruction, to
join in sisterhood with women when often we are divided, to understand
power structures with the intention of challenging them.”

Riot Grrrl was
an American underground feminist punk rock movement that originally
started in Washington, D.C.; Olympia, Washington; Portland, Oregon; and
the greater Pacific Northwest in the early to mid-1990s. The Riot Grrrl
Manifesto (1991) criticizes male-dominated culture and encourages girls
to build their own alternative. It can be read in its entirety in
English here: http://onewarart.org/riot_grrrl_manifesto.htm

Marilyn French (1929-2009) was an American writer. Her most significant work in later life was the four-volume From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women,
published in 2002 and built around the premise that exclusion from the
prevailing intellectual histories denied women their past, present and
future. Despite carefully chronicling a long history of oppression, the
last volume ends on an optimistic note.

Jennifer Baumgardner (born 1970) and Amy Richards (born circa 1971) are American writers and activists. They coauthored Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future (2000) after writing for the feminist magazine Ms. This
book is an analysis of U.S. feminism that claims that "girl culture,"
from women rock stars and athletes to female entrepreneurs and
inventors, supports feminism and has become an integral part of the
national psyche. At the same time, they caution young women not to stop
and rest on the success of cultural feminism, but to develop political
lives and awareness, and include appendixes to teach novices the
nuts-and-bolts of community organizing. Jennifer is openly bisexual and
has also written about the bisexual experience.

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